Ok.. Logbook pro looks to be the industry standard for digital logs.. Any good suggestions on how to get 15000 plus hours into LBP cleanly?

 

You have a couple options:

1. For a fee, Coradine, can go through all your old logbooks and manually input. Data entry essentially. Would be very cost prohibitive though and not worth it in my opinion.

2. Sit down over a many month/year period and do it yourself. No cost but ends with same result as above.

3. Do what I did. I was in the same boat as you. Input one single entry called "balance forward". 15,000 hours. Break it down with single/multi/jet/instrument and whatever. Go from there. Much easier and done in a couple of minutes.

Good luck.

 

It was time consuming. But I went back to 0 time and line by line thru my logbooks. It ended up taking 6 months with an hour here and an hour there. But it is amazing how a computer can chase down .1 here and there. I thought I was pretty decent at simple addition (apparently not!!) All my cohorts thought I was insane my wife called me crazy but it worked out well.

 

I was about 8 years behind on my logbook when I decided I had to do something. Took some others advice and got logbook pro. I brought forward all my time that I had logged on paper as a few separate entries. So all piston single engine went in on one line, same for multi, then turbo prop, then jet SIC. I started the detailed entries with all my turbine PIC, as it wasn't logged anywhere, just on trip printouts. To log that ~6000 hours took me probably two months of going at it pretty hard on my days off. In the three interviews I've had since that time, only one even looked at my logbook. For what its worth, they were impressed with the LBP printout. Its definitely much cleaner than a traditional written book.

Its going to take you forever to log 15000 hours in detail, maybe try to find some significant, logical break point like I did and go from there?

 

Pay an accountant to do it.

 

When I bought LBP they were offering a 3 month free trial of the iPhone app and subscription to the cloud. I took advantage of this by taking my logbook and trip sheets with me anytime I thought that I might be sitting for a while. I was able to enter about 5 years of flying over the course of just a couple of weeks. It also worked to sell me on the app/cloud subscription.

 

When I first bought Logbook Pro I had somewhere around 9000 hours. What I did was enter the data flight-by-flight through my first part 135 job where my flying became very consistant (i.e. same airplane type day after day). That didn't take too long (first ~1450 hours, i think) and was a good way to learn how to use the program.

Next I created a new "Aircraft" type called "Transfer" for each category/class/type. I then made one entry with the totals from each page. i.e. "Transfer DC9", "Transfer BAe-3201", etc. With this I was able to get through the entire logbook in a reasonable amount of time and I still had the breakdowns by type, engine, class, category, etc. This is key for using the powerful search and totaling features for filling out applications.

I'm now going back through and replace each "Transfer" page one at a time with the individual entries. The overall totals and search results don't change for filling out applications but I'm making progress toward eventually having everything entered in full detail.

Of course I've kept it current with new flying since the time I started using it.

 

Has anyone showed their results to an interviewer? And has anyone "imported" file info from their company website?

 

Thanks for this, just sat down and broke down all my mil time from past 9 years. I will be getting the logbook pro app and using it from now on and using the "Balance Forward" option or the break down by aircraft/category up to today.

 

I did what many above have. Just broke it down by aircraft type in about 8 lines at the top and put in remarks that it was a cumulative entry from paper logs.